9.2 million cocktail drinkers and gin only takes second place

Mark Harris, of Pernod Ricard UK, estimated that there were around 9.2 million cocktails drinkers in the UK last year, with the industry worth around £500 million. In response, the team at makemeacocktail.com has created this infographic to reflect the top cocktail trends for 2018 based on current user recipe and ingredient searches.

Vodka remains the most commonly used cocktail spirit, with nearly a quarter of cocktails (24%) containing the distilled beverage. Although this is down 4% from 2012 when we last collated this data.
Gin is the only spirit in the top 10 most used spirits list to have seen increased usage over the last five years, increasing from appearing in 9% to 9.84% of cocktail recipes.

More climbers in the top 10 cocktail spirits:
Cointreau has booted Midori out of the top ten (slumping from a high of appearing in 4.7% of cocktail recipes to just 4.18%).

More fallers in the movers and shakers:
peach schnapps, which holds its place as the third most used spirit despite a reduced recipe appearance (down from 8.8% in 2012 to 7% today).
Blue Bols Curacao tumbled from appearing in 8.4% in 2012 to just 6.43% today.
Amaretto slips from eighth to tenth place appearing in just 4.5% of cocktail nowadays.

Mixer trends
Orange juice (12%) tops the list of cocktail mixers but slips from appearing in 14.5% of recipes to just 12.19%.
Lime juice slides from second to fourth place in the mixer list accounting for its role in 11.6% in 2012 but just 9.52% of recipes today, switching places with lemon juice (10.71%).

Glassware trends
Whatever exact shape your martini glass may take, in the 10th anniversary year since the Sex And The City Movie premiered, it’s the martini glass that’s the most used cocktail glassware, with 31% of cocktails served in the delicate vessel.
The highball takes second place (26%) as the most common serve for our beloved mojito
The lowball (15%) and the shot glass (11%) round up the most common of cocktail glassware serves.

Cocktail trivia
*1798 - the year the word cocktail first appeared in a British newspaper
*1905 - the most cocktails served in an hour, by bartender Sheldon Wiley in 2014
*2014 - the number of cocktails on Pench’s Bar menu in Varna, Bulgaria
*AU$12,500 - the Guiness World Record Holding price (that was reviewed due to an alleged casino heist it was thought the cocktail stunt was a cover for) for the world’s most expensive cocktail created in Shane Warne’s cocktail bar Club 23. The drink was named The Winston for its incorporation of a 1858 vintage Croizet Cuvee Leonie cognac that Churchill and Eisenhower are said to have sipped while planning the D-Day landings.

About makemeacocktail.com
makemeacocktail.com is an online resource where users can enter what ingredients they have and get shown what they can make with said ingredients. It utilises a clever substitution algorithm to broaden users' results while still allowing cocktails to be exact and accurate.
The website contains over 3000 cocktail recipes with clear instructions and photos to help users make the best cocktails they can.

Review our My Bar feature:
Put our My Bar functionality to the test by entering into My Bar the ingredients you have at home to make cocktails from. Click the button and hey presto - what recipe will you make tonight?